The climax of this story is the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 ... Australian Ways of Death: A Social and. Cultural History ... on the commemoration of the military casualties of the world wars ... abroad during World War I. Underpinning this period.
Oceania and the Pacific Islands relentless and dislocating transformations of relationships among the Hawaiian monarchy, the nobles, the commoners, and resident Westerners. It is a "story of how colonialism worked in Hawai'i not through the naked seizure of lands and governments but through a slow insinuating invasion of people, ideas, and institutions" (p. 3). The really significant transformations in nineteenth-century Hawai'i, he argues-in rulership, land tenure, immigration, and especially "in the meaning of identity and belonging"-all came about as "legal changes." Osorio's thesis is that language is a "creator and a destroyer, and the law is nothing if not language." Submission to "the language of law and especially to its ubiquity and its fickleness" is, he says, what has altered the Hawaiians' sense of themselves and of their "inherent sovereignty" (p. 251). This proposition is tracked through a sequence of constitutional changes from the first Hawaiian Constitution in 1840 when, under missionary influence, the power of the monarch was first subject to (minimal) constraints of vestigial legal process and representative government. Then came major land divisions and concepts of private ownership and, under the 1852 Constitution, the arrival of Westerners into the House of Representatives. All the while, foreigners were increasingly replacing chiefs as "principal authorities in ... government" (p. 29), and Hawaiians in government and in the community generally were divided among themselves and compromised in terms of their identities, values, and organizing structures as they necessarily participated in the practices of Western constitutionality and economic modernity. The climax of this story is the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, whereby King Kalakaua was forced to abandon any executive control to a Western-manipulated government structure, one that now thoroughly involved and divided Hawaiians. The law, says Osorio, was "bigger than the king and bigger than all his [Hawaiian] supporters and opponents ... the law enabled their talents, courage, and loyalties to work against them as a people, helping to frame them as political parties while eroding their historic kinship with one another. They were marginalized, thrust to the edges of political discourse, while the constitution, this foreign idea, took hold of the center of the controversies that it had created" (p. 254). The story ends with Bayonet and not with the subsequent downfall of the monarchy and annexation by the United States some years later. For Osorio, the Bayonet Constitution was the end, a "demonstration of haole control" (p. 195). A final, eloquent chapter illustrates critical links between these now more than 100-year-old events and current complex and still divisive issues swirling through the discourses of Hawaiian nationhood and identity. While Osorio does not specifically make the point, his analysis has implications that go well beyond the case of Hawai'i. He has raised big questions about the consequences for traditional societies when they engage with Western liberal constitutional values and
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institutions. Overall, Osorio's scholarship is both deeply moving and profoundly disturbing. K. R. HowE Massey University PAT JALLAND. Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918. New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp. vi, 378. $55.00. In 1878, Samuel Pratt Winter, a prominent if eccentric pastoralist in the colony of Victoria, died. Winter, an agnostic, left instructions that a simple stone cairn be erected to mark his grave, in the manner of the local Aborigines. His rejection of a traditional British burial in favor of "being buried in the stones where the blacks are buried" (p. 116) shook the colonial elite. Winter was condemned for insulting his race and his class by denying them the right to honor his death appropriately. This controversy serves as an apt reminder that although death and bereavement are inevitable and universal, the social practices with which they are marked are historically and culturally specific. And, as is demonstrated comprehensively by Pat Jalland's important new history, they are shaped by the circumstances and conditioning of class and gender differences. With the exception of a growing body of scholarship on the commemoration of the military casualties of the world wars, the study of death has attracted little interest from historians of Australia. Indeed, one of the elements attributed to the Australian characterand especially to the legendary figures of the bushman or Anzac soldier-has been the reticence to address death, and certainly to avoid "excessive" outpourings of grief. Jalland's work is timely, providing knowledge about the past to current debates about palliative care, euthanasia, and medical biotechnology. It also contributes to a rising interest in the cultural history of emotion, with its focus on the feelings of individual Australians about the death of family members, especially spouses and children. Death is a vast and intricate topic, and no one model dominated the Australian settler experience. Jalland has concentrated on what is distinctive to the Australian colonies/states. Drawing extensively upon letters, diaries, and other manuscript and published sources, the book's core arguments are bound together by and substantiated through detailed narratives of family loss and commemoration. Many of these stories are those of the colonial middle class, but J all and is attune to the array of economic, regional, and denominational distinctions. Aboard the immigrant ships, for instance, official attitudes toward those dispatched to "a watery grave" depended on whether the deceased was steerage or cabin class, child or adult, Catholic or Protestant. Sea burials were part of the transition between the old and new worlds and the displacement of established rituals of death. While the urban middle class in Australia strove to recreate, albeit with some relax-
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Reviews of Books
ation, funeral and mourning practices brought from Britain, outside the cities an independent tradition of bush burials evolved. Australian frontiers were isolated and violent, and accidental death was common. Jalland's section on death in the bush, including that of women and children, is particularly strong in illustrating how the harshness of the settler experience meant that changes to everyday practices and systems of belief occurred through necessity. Jalland's investigation stretches from the 1840s, as the rise in mass immigration led to the development of a complex colonial society, to the rupture or "denial" of death caused by the slaughter of 60,000 young men abroad during World War I. Underpinning this period are major demographic shifts. Settler mortality rates among infants and young children steadily declined, even in the remote outback. This was due to reductions in infectious and intestinal disease as well as of average family size; fewer children equaled more effective nurturing. By the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy at birth was considerably extended, with old age replacing infancy as the most probable cause of death. At the same time, Australian society became increasingly secular. J alland devotes several chapters to exploring how the understandings of a "good Christian death" were transplanted by British and Irish immigrants and were enacted through individual and communal rituals of mourning. But, she argues, the traditional Christian observance of death declined more quickly in the Australian colonies than in Britain or Ireland. Clergy were relatively rare, and in any case a substantial proportion of working-class immigrants had aln:ady abandoned church attendance. The predominantly masculine population, particularly in the bush, also accounted for a more individualized approach to death. Jalland's exploration of gendered behaviors as central to emotional and cultural responses toward the dying and the deceased is crucial to the book:'s contention that there were unique Australian ways of death. Her book deserves to be read widely, and I hope it will stimulate further studies. that probe as astutely the particular cultural meanings of death and mourning within colonial societies. KATE DARIAN-SMITH
University of Melbourne
CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880-1950. (MeGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion.) Montreal and Kingston: MeGill-Queen's University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 306. $49.95. WILLIAM H. KATERBERG.
The dustjacket of William H. Katerberg's provocative book captures the essence of its central argument. The steeple of a Gothic-style church is reflected in the glass windows of a skyscraper. In the reflection, the church appears to be as tall as the modern tower. It is a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
powerful and imposing presence. Katerberg's thesis is that the Anglican Church in North America still resonates in modern society. He argues that the Anglican Church experienced a myriad of changes in response to the challenges of modernity between 1880 and 1950 but remained a vibrant religious institution with a compelling Christian message. Since the 1960s, the Anglican Church has experienced much more serious pressure, but these recent difficulties, according to the author, should not be projected back into the history of the Anglican Church in North America. In Katerberg's estimation, challenges brought by Darwinian thought, the rise of critical inquiry, industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of consumerism and leisure irt modern society splintered the Anglican community into a number of differing traditions or religious outlooks. This fragmentation and uncertainty about what the Anglican faith entailed did not represent decline. Modernity did not necessarily undermine faith or unleash a process of secularization. Katerberg is alive to the important differences between the Anglican experience in Canada and the Episcopal Church in the United States. He demonstrates that debates were sharper in the United States, resulting in deeper conflict and fragmentation. In analyzing these differences, Katerberg follows the work of scholars like David Bebbington and the late George Rawlyk in suggesting that the greater influence of British Anglicanism in Canada as well as Britain's social values and political culture led to a more "irenic" Canadian religious culture. Since Canada was a less crowded society with more open spaces, greater opportunity for new parishes to emerge existed. As a result, Katerberg asserts, the debates and conflict within the Canadian Anglican church were less intense. What made the Canadian and American experience of Anglicanism different were not ritual or theology but rather social context and colonial heritage. In outlining his argument, which is copiously documented and clearly presented, Katerberg focuses on the lives of five prominent Anglican divines. This book is a series of five intellectual biographies interspersed with very rich contextual chapters on the history of Anglicanism in North America. For Canada, the author focuses on Henry Griffin Thomas, a Torontobased conservative evangelical who became a fundamentalist; Henry Cody, another Toronto-based liberal evangelical; and Dyson Hague, a Toronto-based conservative evangelical. All three men had a relationship with the deeply evangelical Wycliffe College in Toronto. From the United States, there are portraits of the liberal Carl Grammer, who edited the Protestant Episcopal Review, based in Philadelphia, and Henry T. Manning, an evangelical of "resolutely high church" sympathies. This narrow focus is not sufficiently representative to carry Katerberg's criticism of the secularization thesis or to present an accurate picture of Anglicanism. A broader canvas is required including examples of divines with somewhat different religious
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